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Trial of a Drug Czar Tests Mexico's New Democracy

Several days a week, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo and two of his former aides file into a glass-walled courtroom in a prison on a wind-swept mountain plateau to hear new testimony in the drug trial unfolding against them.

General Gutierrez, the highest-ranking Mexican official ever tried on narcotics charges, sits impassively behind a steel grating, listening as the prosecution's story of his corruption by traffickers is told and retold. Occasionally he stands erect in khaki prison garb, pushing his spectacles up his nose to address the court.

Often he has used these occasions to accuse Mexico's Secretary of Defense of persecuting him in order to protect other corrupt generals. Several times he has said that he holds explosive information -- gleaned from his experience as Mexico's top drug enforcement official -- linking senior politicians to the drug trade.

Six months into the proceedings against General Gutierrez on narcotics, abuse of authority and arms charges, they have provoked extraordinary tensions, both inside the military and out, and are posing a watershed test for Mexico's simultaneous effort to implant a fledgling democracy and pursue a troubled war on drugs.

''The Mexican Government has a tremendous dilemma -- how far to take these investigations,'' said Jorge Chabat Madrid, a political scientist here. ''You could have half the political class implicated in scandal, and that's a problem for any society.''

The governing party is watching the trial closely. Opposition politicians are preparing to use newly won congressional powers to investigate corruption in a Government that has been controlled by one party for 68 years. The army officer corps is unsettled because the trial has focused a rare spotlight on their secret society, which had hitherto seemed untouchable.

''Never has there been a trial of such a high-ranking official, with the case discussed openly in the press and with official documentation on the case getting into the hands of the public,'' said Roderic A. Camp, a professor at Tulane University who studies the military. ''There's nothing comparable to this in recent Mexican history.''

Hinting at upheaval in the military, a series of Defense Ministry intelligence files that tie a string of generals to traffickers were recently obtained and published by the Mexican news magazine Proceso. The Defense Secretary, Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, reacted with fury, court-martialing an army colonel and a captain accused of purloining the files.

The revelations appear to have provoked bloodshed. A beauty queen -- the erstwhile lover of a former army chief of staff -- was gunned down hours after her name appeared in the documents as an agent of traffickers and she acknowledged to reporters that her intimate knowledge of the military could damage many generals. Hours after her killing, military police searched files and other belongings at her home. Authorities later released a 1996 letter they said she wrote, suggesting that she feared retribution from General Gutierrez or from traffickers.

In another incident, the Government asserted that a key witness against General Gutierrez was wounded in an ambush and officials blamed the General and his lawyers of orchestrating the attack. The witness showed up in court soon thereafter, however, appearing healthy, and the General accused the Government of fabricating the incident.

General Gutierrez is undergoing parallel military and civilian trials on drug, abuse of authority and weapons charges. The proceedings appear to have become a personal showdown between Generals Gutierrez and Cervantes, the Defense Secretary, who has barred reporters from the court-martial and forbidden military personnel from speaking to reporters. Journalists have been permitted, intermittently, to attend the civilian proceedings unfolding in Almoloya penitentiary.

This week, as General Gutierrez was to outline his full defense for the first time, he had promised to fill out his vague accusations against the Mexican elite by naming names. But minutes before his testimony, authorities abruptly barred reporters from the proceedings, and defense lawyers postponed his appearance.

Since General Gutierrez's arrest and arraignment six months ago, several of his former aides have testified that during the General's tenure as drug czar -- and earlier as the commander of the five-state 5th Military Region in central Mexico -- he worked closely with the agents and gunmen of one trafficking organization, headed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, to undermine the country's other major smuggling group, headed by the Arellano Felix family of Tijuana.

The Government has failed to show, however, that General Gutierrez protected specific drug shipments, that he hid his operations from superiors, or -- although his arrest followed the discovery that he was living in a $1,300-a-month apartment owned by Mr. Carrillo Fuentes -- that he received any great fortune from traffickers.

For his part, the General has testified that he kept the Defense Secretary informed about many of the operations cited in the charges against him. He has also established by questioning the junior officers testifying against him that they were detained and interrogated, illegally, for days before their public presentation as voluntary prosecution witnesses. That suggests that General Gutierrez, whose agents stand accused of routinely torturing drug suspects, is himself now facing a case built around coerced witnesses.

General Gutierrez's assertion that he is being scapegoated has been supported by testimony and documents that have emerged during the trial showing that the Defense Ministry previously uncovered widespread narcotics corruption in its ranks and did nothing.

One document published in Proceso showed that a 1991 army investigation revealed extensive collaboration among traffickers and generals, including the commander of the 5th Region who preceded General Gutierrez. None of the generals named in the document appear to have been prosecuted, and according to official records cited in Mexican publications, several of the generals named continue to hold army posts.

The Defense Ministry responded to the publication of its secret documents with a statement asserting that this year 34 soldiers have been prosecuted for narcotics crimes. But the statement gave no names or ranks, and General Gutierrez immediately disputed the claim.

Politicians, even from within the governing party, are calling for increased outside scrutiny of the military.

''It's time to break with the taboos that treat the army as an untouchable power,'' said Luis Garfias Magana, the governing party deputy who heads the Defense Committee in the Congress.

Stung by the criticism, the Ministry responded recently with a three-page editorial in the magazine of the Mexican Army and Air Force. ''Do they want us to keep ourselves immaculately clean inside our barracks and let the narcotics cancer and its associated crimes advance?'' the editorial asked. ''Who and what interests are served by these tendentious criticisms that cast doubt on our professionalism and institutionalism?''